Dr. Seuss and Philosophy
Page 22
The Grinch’s Metamorphosis: Seeing the Light of Reason?
One possibility is that the Grinch suddenly grasps some truth that he didn’t see or only saw dimly before. For instance, think of the way that geometrical or logical proofs can often work for us. As any student of math or logic can recall, you can puzzle over a problem for a long, long time, turning it around this way and that way, and then suddenly the solution can hit you spontaneously (or sadly, not). In this kind of case, your mind suddenly tracks the geometrical truth, and once it does, you see it all clearly. Reason somehow shows you the right direction, illuminating the understanding in a new way.
Of course, this geometry example is a case of abstract thinking, a case of what you might call theoretical reasoning, as opposed to practical reasoning about how to live and what sort of person to be. This difference might seem like a big one, but not all philosophers believe so. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the eighteenth-century German philosopher, acknowledged differences between theoretical and practical reasoning, but he thought that in the ideal, practical reasoning should heed the dictates of reason just as strictly as theoretical reasoning. As he saw things, the main difference between the two was that the former required the assistance of the will, while the latter didn’t. Think of it this way. When you think about “7 + 4,” your mind immediately goes to 11 as the correct answer. There is no two-step process where you think your way to 11 and then decide whether you are going to believe what your mind tells you. You simply see 11, and that’s that. And if you don’t come to 11, then you’re simply not a very good mathematician. Of course, you might not want to give someone the right answer when questioned, so you might say the will could still be involved in this way, but this is a different issue. The will certainly plays a role in giving the right answer, but no role in arriving at 11 as the right answer in the first place. On the other hand, when reason tells you what you ought to do (practical reason) as opposed to what you ought to think or believe (theoretical reason), the will must join forces with reason to produce an action. Thought without the will would be inert. Thus, Kant thought that doing the right thing, as opposed to thinking the right thing, required reason and the will to join forces, with reason directing the will down the correct path.
Now if Kant were to think about the Grinch, he’d surely take him to task for his nasty Christmas scheme. Kant thought that the moral law commanded respect for each and every rational being. In one famous formulation of the law, Kant insisted that rational beings must always be treated as “ends in themselves,” not as a means to our own ends: “Act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.”1 Hence, just as the Grinch wouldn’t want the citizens of Who-ville to take his stuff and to revel in his unhappiness, neither should he treat them in this way. After all, they matter every bit as much as he does. Kant had various versions of his moral law, but he thought they all came to the same thing: A rational being must prize the inherent dignity of equally worthy rational beings. As a rational being, I must pursue my life, duly constrained by the moral law. I express my rational autonomy by choosing to follow the law, rather than being ruled by mere inclination. All sorts of creatures can have desires, but only a moral being has the capacity to evaluate those desires. The moral law serves as a filter by which we can live true to a vision of rational beings as free and equal beings.
What might get in reason’s way in this regard? Well, human beings are not all reason. We have all sorts of inclinations that can pull us against reason, the better part of our inevitably mixed nature. Of course, we don’t know for sure why the Grinch hated Christmas so much and why he so badly wanted to spoil the happy occasion for Who-ville. Maybe he envied their good cheer and fellowship. Maybe he saw all this fuss about Christmas as a pathetic, hypocritical farce begging to be exposed for what it truly was. Maybe he just never liked the Whos and simply wanted to hurt them for his own satisfaction. We can’t say for sure, and to be honest, Kant wasn’t all that confident about being able to plumb the depths of the human heart with any degree of certainty in this sense. As a matter of fact, Kant thought that the roads to perdition were many and varied, and they all passed through the darkness of our often-insidious desires and inclinations: We can want and feel all sorts of things that divert us from the moral law, and like a veritable slave to our own desires, we can give into them, thereby forsaking the higher moral law for the dictates of its lesser. Kant thought we could only be truly free when reason ruled us, when we obeyed the law of our higher rational nature.
If you think about real life for a moment, you may be tempted to say that Kant’s presumable picture of moral change, some sudden rational apprehension of the moral law and a resulting correction to align oneself with that law, usually isn’t very effective when it comes to stopping bad guys from mistreating others. After all, when the desperados knock down your door and break your glasses, all your plaintive (or self-righteous) cries of “But don’t you see how wrong it is for you to treat me like this?” usually come to naught. Yet, maybe this undeniable fact of life simply reinforces Kant’s vital point: When we are in the grip of such powerful desires and feelings (like the bad guys), they can hijack reason and keep us from seeing the world clearly. In this light, maybe a Kantian conception of a metanoia shouldn’t be judged by its relative infrequency or lack of potency. After all, it can be really hard to achieve clarity when it comes to all sorts of instances of theoretical reasoning, so why shouldn’t we expect the same with respect to practical reasoning? We can so easily be blinded by mad passion of one sort or another.
What would a Kantian explanation of the Grinch’s change of heart look like? It could actually take more than one form. Or more precisely, there could be two elements to the moment of clarity and the resulting change of heart. For instance, the Grinch could suddenly come to see that the moral law actually commands him to live differently than he’s been living to date. In this case, he might think all along that he was actually living an upright life, and in a moment of reflection or spontaneous clarity, he might come to see that he wasn’t living true to his rational principles. In other words, he might somehow believe that he was doing the right thing by taking away the cheap and tawdry trappings of Christmas, and in a moment of crystal-clear vision, he might suddenly see that the moral law forbids such things. He might realize that he is actually disrespecting the Whos by stealing Christmas.
Then again, instead of realizing what the law commands in this specific instance, the Grinch might suddenly realize that he has allowed himself to be hijacked systematically by his wayward inclinations, not just episodically. Ultimately, an autonomous being isn’t ruled by his desires, but rather, by the moral law that manifests his true dignity. In light of this realization, the Grinch might resolve anew to set himself aright by following the commands of the law.
Notice that these two elements, one being an instance of poor judgment and the other a matter of inadequate oversight, might also go together. The Grinch might suddenly realize that he has been fooling himself all along about his fidelity to the moral law because he was unwittingly feeding the fires of his wayward inclinations, and now that he sees his circumstances clearly, he might resolve to put himself back on the upright track. A particular episode like the sound of Who-ville singing might somehow alert him to the general shape and orbit of his own life, effectively driving home the realization that his life has been nothing short of a shameful sham. Awakened anew to the real meaning of equal respect for his fellow creatures, he might renew his resolve to put reason back in the driver’s seat. Having drifted away from his deep respect for the moral law, he might come back home to reason, so to speak.
We don’t have to work too hard to find examples from everyday life that seem to fit this general description. I am unfair to someone because I begrudge him his far greater success. My envy works around the clock to sow the seeds of seething resentment. If I can convince myse
lf that he has wronged me or that his gains are ill gotten, I can take refuge in righteous indignation, something far more comfortable than a frank admission of my own inferiority in some respect or other. Maybe this is what happened to the Grinch. Maybe he was always something of a loner, living on Mount Crumpit and seeing the laughter and camaraderie of the Whos as something of a slap in the face. Those Whos think they are so big, so much better than me. Well, they are all fakes and hypocrites. They don’t really love each other. All they really care about is the Christmas loot. Take that away from them and then see how happy they seem. Yes, that’s it! I shall expose those phonies for what they really are. But when Christmas survives in spite of the Grinch’s crusade, perhaps he sees not just the Whos but also himself more clearly. Maybe his change of heart is a case of his head realizing the twisted corruptions of his own heart. As the Seuss story goes, “It could be that his head wasn’t screwed on quite right” (Grinch), and maybe he suddenly sees the light, just as we can see the error of our ways when we are going the wrong way in a geometrical proof.
This is one way to look at the Grinch, and indeed, changes of heart in general—as instances of coming around to some important principle that we have ignored, abandoned, or just haven’t noticed before. The emphasis in this case is on reason: The light we see is the light of reason making plain the undeniable truth, and once we see it, we cannot resist it, just as we can’t ignore the truth about geometry or arithmetic.
The Grinch’s Change: Bring Back That Loving Feeling?
Yet, consider another way to think about the Grinch’s change of heart. One might contend that the Grinch doesn’t suddenly grasp some new truth, but instead, he feels something new. Whereas Kant saw ethics in terms of rational moral laws, David Hume (1711–1776), the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, looked to human sentiments as the ultimate source. As Hume saw things, reason must always be the slave of the passions in a fundamental sense. He regarded sympathy, our capacity, and indeed, our decided proclivity to participate imaginatively in the weal and woe of our fellow human beings, as the cornerstone of morality. Show Hume a Grinch who might not only wish to steal Christmas but also annihilate every last Who in the world, and he might say many bad things about such a mean fellow, but “irrational” wouldn’t be one of them.
In fact, imagine for just a moment a Grinch who didn’t care about anyone else in the whole wide world. As Seuss might say, “Not a bit, not a stitch, not even a sliver” (Grinch). As far as this Grinch would be concerned, Hume would say he’d have no reason to blink an eye, even if so doing might save a thousand little Cindy-Lou Whos from some grave threat. A Grinch who might stand idly by as the Whos starve or suffer Who genocide would be many things—cold, callous, cruel. But these vices wouldn’t necessarily make him irrational. The road to change would not be paved by reason for Hume, at least not in Kant’s sense. He would insist that you could never get this Grinch to care about even one Cindy-Lou unless you established a connection between little Cindy-Lou and something else he already cared about, or unless you said or did something that gave rise to a new desire to save Cindy-Lou.
You can easily imagine all sorts of desires that might fit into the former category. The Grinch might love chocolate chip cookies, and it might just so happen that nobody could possibly beat Cindy-Lou Who’s cookies. Or the Grinch could have all sorts of terrible aches and pains, and Cindy-Lou might be just the little Who doctor to cure him. If Cindy-Lou effectively spared her own life by convincing the Grinch that it was worth his while to keep her around, we wouldn’t say that he really cared about her. In this case, he would simply see her as an instrument to satisfy his own desires. The kind of reasoning that she and the Grinch would engage in would be means-end reasoning by way of demonstrating a connection between her existence and something else that the Grinch really wants.
Of course, sometimes such discoveries about means and ends have very big effects on a life. If the Grinch really wants to make millions of dollars and finds out that teaching philosophy in a university is the best way to go, then this will be big news for him. But notice that the revelation about an effective means to his end would only induce a change in what the Grinch does, not a change in what he is, at least not in any deep sense. What he’s really all about in this case is making a whole lot of money, and philosophy is just an effective means to the same. True enough, the practice of philosophy might eventually change the Grinch in some respects since form often follows function, but the piece of practical reasoning that brings him to a new end—whether this is teaching philosophy or saving Cindy-Lou Who—will hardly be something that constitutes a watershed in who he is. In this case, he’s just a Grinch who figured out how to get what he really wanted all along.
Hume, like Kant, didn’t think that this kind of indirect (instrumental) concern for Cindy-Lou could confer any genuine moral credit on a person. Both would agree that the Grinch would have to care about Cindy-Lou for her own sake, and not just as a means to satisfy some other desire. But here is where Kant and Hume would part company. Whereas Kant would frame moral goodness in terms of a principled respect for Cindy-Lou’s intrinsic worth as a rational being, Hume would look to sympathy’s fellow-feeling, where the emphasis really is on feeling. In other words, while Kant would look to the head, Hume would look to the heart by way of what amounts to love in some form or another. As Hume says in his Treatise, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”2
When it comes to giving a person a reason to do anything in life, Hume thinks that justifications can only go so far. When accounting for what you did, you will always come to a reason for which you can give no further reason other than the sheer fact of your desire. Why did you save your pennies for so long? To buy myself a fantastic violin. Why do you want a fantastic violin? To play beautiful music. Why do you want to play beautiful music? Because I do. True enough, one might redescribe the desire in various terms (Beautiful music makes me feel so good), but the descriptions would ultimately go only so far and they, too, would be open to the very same line of questioning (Why do you want to feel so good?). In the end, you’d get to a point where you couldn’t say anything more about why you want this rather than that.
Hume thought this was so for all things, including morality. One might make all sorts of fine-tuned moral distinctions about subtle concepts and perceptive observations about moral phenomena, but in the end, morality came down to the fact that human beings were psychologically disposed to experience certain kinds of feelings and desires about the weal and woe of fellow human beings. Show Hume a Grinch totally devoid of any care and concern for little Cindy-Lou Who and he might call him all sorts of bad names—cruel, callous, uncaring, selfish, brutish, insensitive. But he certainly wouldn’t call him irrational.
Why does this detail matter? Well, for someone like Hume, a change of heart must always depend on a change of heart in the colloquial sense. Such a change is not some apprehension of a rational truth that might be dispassionately explained and appreciated. Instead, the change must be the birth or the rekindling of feeling, an affective reaction rather than an intellectual one. We might speak of a kind of seeing and knowing here, but not in the way that we speak of seeing and knowing our way to solving a geometrical proof.
We don’t have to look very far to find all sorts of examples that fit this kind of description. Years ago, I watched one of my brothers die, and after I spent his last night alone with him in the hospital, I certainly emerged a changed person. Unlike the Grinch, I didn’t do any complete about-face, but the experience left me a different fellow in key respects. How so? Well, I definitely didn’t gain any deeper intellectual appreciation of the biological facts of death. My brother was there, and then he was gone. His heart was beating, and then it was not. His brain had electrical activity, and then it was all gone. I understood these biological facts going in, and I certainly understood them going out. But my appreciation
of death was different, and the important difference had to do with the emotional experience of watching my brother die. The difference was a feeling one, not a dispassionate thinking one. The experience left a deep mark on my life.
If we return to the Grinch, his experience seems more like mine than it does like a Kantian change of heart. Seuss says that the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day, and the sense is that he feels something new, something that leaves him a changed Grinch. Hearing Who-ville singing without their Christmas presents and trappings put the Grinch on a serious wonder.
And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: “How could it be so?
It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes or bags!” (Grinch)
I don’t think the Grinch reaches a new, dispassionate conclusion, the way we might about a geometrical or logical proof. Instead, I think he experiences a new kind of feeling toward the Whos, something that changes the way he sees the world; in the process, this change in sentiment changes who he is.
A Final Word: Who Gives a Grinch?
Let’s suppose that I am right here about the Grinch. Again, Seuss tells us that the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day, so it seems we are on safe ground with this guess. Even if the Grinch’s case is a change of feeling, this is just one fictional example, and it needn’t say anything definitive about whether most changes of the heart are more about the heart than the head, so to speak. The example of the Grinch invites us to reflect on how reason and emotions figure in being good more generally. Kant was very worried about making moral goodness a matter of feelings in any important sense. After all, we cannot command ourselves to feel something in any straightforward way. As he saw things, moral goodness must be within our power, and indeed, must be equally so for all of us if praise and blame are to make sense. How could it make sense to hold people responsible for what they do or who they are if these things rely on feelings that they might or might not have through no fault of their own? He sought a foundation for moral goodness in reason, and he believed that reason could hit on right action not just by accident but by tracking the moral truth, just as theoretical reason tracks the truth in mathematics or logic. Ideally, feeling would run parallel to reason, but feeling on its own could never have any moral authority.